Children have been targeted in attacks at a “shocking scale” during 2017, according to the UN Children’s Fund which has renewed calls for all parties in conflicts to abide by international law and end attacks involving children.
Manuel Fontaine, director of emergency programmes at UNICEF, said that as attacks against children continue “year after year”, the world “cannot become numb”.
“Children are being targeted and exposed to attacks and brutal violence in their homes, schools and playgrounds…” he said. “Such brutality cannot be the new normal.”
UNICEF said this week that children have been targeted and exposed to attacks in homes, schools and playgounds in incidents in which they been maimed and killed, used as human shields and recruited to fight. The organisation said rape, forced marriage, abduction and enslavement have become “standard tactics” in conflicts including those which have taken place in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, South Sudan and Myanmar.
The year’s lowlights have included the killing of almost 900 children in Afghanistan in the first nine months of 2017, a dramatic increase in the number of children being killed, raped, abducted and recruited by armed groups in the Central African Republic, Boko Haram’s forced use of least 135 children as suicide bombers in Nigeria and Cameroon – a figure almost five times the number of the previous year, and, the killing or injuring of at least 5,000 children during what has now been 1,000 days of fighting in Yemen.
In Somalia, 1,740 cases of child recruitment were reported in the first 10 months of 2017 while in Myanmar, Rohingya children witnessed shocking and widespread violence as they were attacked and driven from their homes in Rakhine state, and in South Sudan, children continue to be killed or recruited into armed groups.
